I’ve been on the YC site for months, met 2 cofounders, worked together on 2 different ideas, almost finished 2 MVPs (never more than 20%), but then ditched the whole project due to lack of communication. Like, is communication and constant updates so much to ask for these days? I promise, it was all them, not me. I do my parts perfectly, I’m fun to be around, I listen, I communicate, I give feedback, I lead, I generate ideas, I find customers, I do all the business stuff, I spoke to tons of VCs, I planned the whole year, I literally do 80% of the work… And all I ask of them is to just finish a damn MVP in 2 weeks so we can get customers and find investors quickly! Are all the tech people this unserious or am I just unlucky?
Trust me, if I had enough money I would have just hired an engineer with a contract and a salary instead of all this headache. Sorry if I sound like the bad person here lol. I really am just so fed up of this unseriousness I keep seeing!
Now I’m back on the site to get a 3rd cofounder. Fingers crossed! But my options are really just very limited to begin with. Imagine being a female, and a POC in the startup world? Literally almost all the “good/unscammy” profiles on YC’s site either require you to be in NA/EU, or they all just wanna do fintech and AI, or they all just indirectly want you to have 6+ years of experience. I read every profile to the fullest before writing a message just so that I can write something personal to show that I care, but I still end up getting ignored lol. Since my profile is perfect compared to most, I really can’t help but take this personally. I feel like I am pre-judged the moment they read my name so they don’t even bother reading the message lol
For the sake of it, I will tell you guys what I’m working on and please let me know if anybody still wants to be my CTO after all of this :))
I’ve been studying Gen Z’s behaviour around the world for like a whole year, and I know what kind of tech would go viral. I have this very developed idea for an app that allows Gen Z to connect with others but while (playing a game of) answering interesting questions or debating a certain topic together. I believe this will unconsciously help them develop their interpersonal skills and teach them new things while having fun with other people in the process. I can already imagine this going pretty viral and I already have the marketing strategy ready. I also have a UI outline, and a rough pitch deck that includes all the business stuff. To be honest, I even have a clear quick exit strategy.
If this sound interesting to anybody and you’re not a mean person and feel like you’d love to join in, I’d more than love to have a team. I’m either looking for a CTO to build the MVP QUICKLY and launch it, or looking for an angel investor that will fund me to hire a tech person to build the MVP QUICKLY, while I handle the rest of the business stuff. Honestly, I’d prefer the latter because I don’t know if I can trust a CTO anymore lol.
As a CTO i’ve noticed a couple of things in your post, which don’t sound good to me at all. I’ll try to explain them.
You’re complaining about being a female and POC, but being a POC myself. This has never stopped me from anything. On YC people only care about things like marketable skills, idea (no idea is preferred), connections, knowledge of industry, experience building businesses.
A CTO does way more than just “build” the product. One of the red flags you’ve shown is that you are planning how long it will take. We as CTOs will tell YOU how long it will take as we have the experience building things like that.
Looking at your idea it sounds like you are building some sort of social network and your business model is ads. Which means that the actual product is the people on your platform. Building a social network is one of the hardest if not the hardest thing to build. It will take a LOOONG time before you will see any profits from an idea like that.
Personal rule i’ve made for myself, I won’t build anything if there’s no potential customers. I want to see a need in the market and there should already be people that want to use my product and are even willing to pay for it regardless if it exists or not. I will find these people myself or talk to people to see what they actually need in order to validate the idea. As a matter of fact i’ve seen people get funding with just a validated idea and without a single line of code written.
As a sidenote for you, it might be good to get some experience building tech products or learning how they are build first. The reason i’m saying this is that it’s also an important skill to reasonably estimate how long it will take to build something. If you’re going to be hiring contractors you are going to be screwed/disappointed with the results, because you have no idea how long something should take.
Please take this as advice on how potential CTOs might view your idea. It’s not meant to break you down.